Menu

Show & Tell (1)

Last week, we started to make our plans for the visualisation more concrete. What we came up with as a first draft is the following:

We want to be able to compare the charts for two countries. We decided on two dropdowns, where you can select a country, and then the chart will be shown as a list. Songs that appear in both charts will be connected through a line. Furthermore, there will be a measure of how much these two countries are alike in terms of their charts.

We think it would also be interesting to compare how two songs or two artists are performing in different countries. We would visualise this with two maps, probably using a colour gradient to indicate differences between countries. Below is a timeline with a slider, so you can see the maps at different moments in time.

Last, we thought it would be fun to analyse the sentiments of the lyrics. That way we might be able to see if maybe more happy songs make it to the top of the charts,… We are currently thinking of bubbles that fill up with the percentages, as we feel the visualisation doesn’t have to be very precise, but just has to give the user an idea.

Some of the feedback we received is that we have to think about the application as a whole: what is the landing page, how do you transition between visualisations? So we sat together to sketch more thought out plans:

This first picture would be the landing page. When it is loaded, a dummy artist and song are selected to show how the visualisation works. The biggest area is a world map, on which countries will be coloured with a gradient, according to the ranking of the song in the respective charts. Underneath is a trendline that shows the global number of listeners for every week. When you move the slider on the timeline, the map changes and the specific moment in time is indicated on the trendline. On the right side, the analysis of the lyrics’ sentiments is shown.

Second is an overlay screen, that allows you to navigate through the visualisations.

Another screen is the view where charts from different countries can be compared. Not much has changed from the original design, except for the timeline and the likeness measure.

The view in which you can compare two songs or two artist is essentially twice the visualisation on the landing page. A possibility for navigation would be that if you click one of the crosses on the maps, you return to the home page.

A last visualisation comprises small multiples to show trendlines. There are different tabs that can be toggled: listener trends (for every song, the trend in the weekly number of listeners), a song ranking over the countries (meaning that for one song, you see the trendline of its ranking in every country) and a country ranking (where you would see ranking trendlines for all the songs that appeared in the charts of that particular country).

We’re already working on the implementation of these sketches, looking forward to seeing how it works out!